Karly Lane
Today i’m so excited to have Karly Lane as my guest blogger. ( Or Karlene Blakemore Mowle for her Wild Rose and Eternal Press books)
Thank you Karly for taking the time out to answer a few of my questions today. Firstly I’m interested in how you came by the idea for North Star. Its different from your two other books Operation Summer Storm and Fallout. (I really enjoyed OSS and looking forward to read Fallout.)
When I began writing, I’d been reading a lot of romantic suspense and so that’s what I decided to try my hand at. The first draft of Operation Summer Storm, ( the first book I ever wrote) was written back in 1999. I had no idea what I was doing and I pretty much wrote it, submitted it somewhere and then when it was rejected—put it away for a year or two and continued over the next 11 years, to pull it out to re-write and have another go at submitting it. When this began to get depressing, I decided maybe I wasn’t supposed to be a romantic suspense author and I decided to try writing something completely different, which ended up becoming North Star.
It’s about as different to my romantic suspense as you can get, and yet, there are elements of suspense mixed in with a bit of romance all set in a rural back drop.
It’s more like your other book The Cattleman’s Runaway Bride. (Karly has four books published)
What inspires your suspense side and how do you plan a suspense book…(I love reading suspense but wouldn’t know were to start to create one.)
I love the fast pace of a romantic suspense and the challenge of bringing your characters together under extreme stress. As a reader and writer, I love watching the chemistry between people and the challenges this creates as the relationship develops. In other genres the romance between characters can’t happen too fast or it messes with the pace of the story—but in a suspense everything happens fast, including the romance and because it happens in stressful situations—there’s usually lots sparks flying!
When I write a rom/sus, I like to start with a question and fit the story around it. What I wanted when I began OSS was someone who was very ordinary to be thrown into circumstances that placed her way beyond her comfort zone. So what could I do with Summer Sheldon, a homebody, who liked her life safe, predictable and without surprises? … put her in the middle of a jungle with a band of mercenaries of course! The trick is to make this situation believable—no matter how bizarre it sounds and I think that’s what makes a good romantic suspense.
Well it’s working as I really loved Summer’s journey.
North Star was full of your humour, I love books with LOL parts, and how you wrote about the kids was so spot on. There are a lot of people going ‘I can so relate to that’ with their own kids. Did those bits come easy for you?
I like to add humour to a story because it helps to show another side of your characters. Whether you’re dealing with a tough Marine or a single mother under a great deal of stress, I think adding a touch of humour can give the reader a peek inside the character that you can’t really show any other way. Also, in North Star, there are elements of the story that are quite dark, so I needed to add some humour to balance that aspect.
The kids in North Star came fairly easy for me, probably because I have children around the same age and I’ve got a bit of real life experience to draw on. I also think that writing about the whole Teenage Daughter Syndrome (TDS) was possibly done for therapeutic purposes!
It’s great when a writer draws from their own experiences as the stories become more real.
Okay now, please tell us what are your plans for your next WIP? Details, details???
I’ve sent away my next book titled Finding Rose and hopefully it contains most of the things people liked about North Star, although there are no teenagers in this one! It’s about a woman who undertakes a journey to discover her grandmothers past in a small rural community.
Oh, Karly I love the title and the sound of it already. I can’t wait to see it on the shelves. Thank you 🙂
So if you are after a romantic suspense set in rural australia then North Star is the book for you. xx
